Interesting. When I run:

perl testARGV.pl 1 2 3 4 5
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then I get

and thats it! the error messages are gone, but where are the values I am trying to print? And I have the shebang in my code specifying

 #!/opt/third/party/bin/perl -w
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and I've verified that it does exists. (Its even in my PATH). When I do:

/opt/third-party/bin/perl -v
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I see

This is perl, v5.6.0 built for Linux-2.4c2.3-i686
 
Copyright 1987-2000, Larry Wall
 
Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License
+ or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5.0 source 
+kit.
 
Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found 
+on
this system using `man perl' or `perldoc perl'.  If you have access to
+ the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Pa
+ge.
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Any more comments? Why don't I get my command line arguments.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, or a typo on your part, the path you give for printing the perl version is not the same path you have in your shebang line. Specifically 'third/party' ne 'third-party'.

You may want to try

perl -e 'print $_, $/ for @ARGV' 1 2 3 4 5
#which prints
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
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in order to assure yourself that perl has been installed correctly.
And of course - see what `which perl` returns in case that the script works fine.

I'm told that with a bad shebang, it uses /bin/sh, which is the ksh around here, so that explains that.

I now have my code working. Thanks for your help.

Odd. It works fine for me.

$ perl testARGV.pl 1 2 3 
Start of testARGV.pl
123
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